SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I Built It: $6M/Year Email AI Platform (Bootstrapped)
18 Jun 2025
Chapter 1: How did Alan de Souza grow Reachbox.ai to $6 million ARR?
Alan D'Souza built Reachbox.ai from zero revenue to 6 million ARR in just 18 months. He added $5 million in revenue in the last six months alone. He's got 4,500 paying customers, growing 25% month over month. But here's the crazy part. 35% of their customers come from just 280 affiliates. They're paying out $50,000 per month in affiliate commissions for life.
And their customers pay an average of $110 per month with only 7.5% churn. 27 employees generating $230,000 in revenue per employee. You're about to learn the exact playbook that generated 6 million ARR in 18 months. Hey, folks. My guest today is Alan DeSouza, and he has thrown his hat in the ring into the AI space.
He's building Reachbox.ai, which is an AI-powered cold email outreach platform offering things like email warm-ups, campaign automation, centralized inbox, et cetera. We're going to jump into it today. Alan, you ready to take us to the top? Of course.
Chapter 2: What strategies did Alan use to acquire 4,500 paying customers?
Okay. This feels like a very crowded space. There's Lemlist. There's Instantly. There's Clay.com touching this space. How is Reachbox different?
Yeah, so when we started Reach Inbox, I think the intent was to kind of build a tool that can automate hyper-personalized emailing at scale, and it was built out of a pain area for us itself. We were trying out all possible tools.
Chapter 3: What role do affiliates play in Reachbox.ai's growth?
We were trying to use everything that was needed, and we were still not able to achieve the level of hyper-personalization or reach the inboxes, and hence the name Reach Inbox, right? You know, what we wanted to do was... We wanted to craft emails that were extremely relevant to the target audience and also kind of designated what they're looking to solve for their business.
Instead of just sending out a blank email to everyone. And that's where we saw the opportunity of AI coming in. We said, okay, if we can hyper-personalize based on recent activity, based on the likes of the user, nothing better than that. So yeah, crafting a personalized offer for every target audience that's there.
Yep.
Chapter 4: How did customer feedback contribute to Reachbox.ai's success?
Well, help me understand because I don't want to lose the audience, right? They're going to be watching this and going, oh, it's another email marketing tool. But you guys have some pretty incredible growth. Can you share your growth just so people stick around for the rest of the show to learn from you?
Of course, of course. So we started towards December 23, and then we were kind of in beta until about June 24. And June 24 was when we started selling out MRR plans. In the last 11 months, we've now clocked about $6 million in ARR, and we're growing about 25% month-on-month.
That's wild. So $6 million in ARR as of today, correct?
Yes.
Chapter 5: What is the significance of customer churn rate in SaaS?
And we're recording this May 6, 2025?
Yes, that's right.
Okay. So just to be clear, we're talking, uh, uh, well, 6 million ARR, right? So that'd be 83,000 a month times six years. You did about 500,000 bucks in revenue last month.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
What are people paying the most for? We're on your feature page right now. What, what's the thing driving the most revenue?
I mean, it's the ā so once you have ā once you get onto the plans, you have various add-ons that are there. So, for example, you can buy a subscription for Reach Inbox. And once you're within Reach Inbox, you can also get your email info from within Reach Inbox. You can find ā you can do lead enrichment from within Reach Inbox. You can use AI credits within Reach Inbox, right? So ā
On an average, when a user comes in, he kind of uploads about 10,000, 15,000 leads.
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Chapter 6: How does Reachbox.ai differentiate itself in a crowded market?
He then wants to enrich those leads. He wants to use his email infra. He wants to ensure that the warming is done properly, and he wants to use AI to kind of do a proper outreach to all of them. So it's a combination of all of these factors that lead to users spending higher on our platform.
And how many paying customers do you have today?
Today, we're roughly at about 4,500 paying customers.
How did you get the first 100?
The first 100 was all using reach inbox. We kind of were using our own tool to kind of do an outreach, reach out to people who were in the SaaS space, in digital businesses, and introducing and telling them, okay, listen, this is the email. This email reached your inbox, so probably you can reach the inbox of your customers as well, right? What did you say, though, Alan?
Because people will hear that and go, well, be specific. I mean, what did you put in the subject line? So you were targeting B2B software. Who were you targeting specifically, and what would you put in the subject line?
Our first initial customers were only SaaS, and we would understand the SaaS. For example, let's say there was a SaaS company which does... website visitor optimization, right? For example, they create multiple copies of the same website. So we would tell them what exactly can Reach Inbox do for them? Like how can Reach Inbox help them acquire customers at scale?
What should they do if they were using Reach Inbox? What are the top three things that they need to do to kind of get more customers? So you tell them, okay, listen, if you go and send a case study to your customers with this thing, you would probably get much more replies. If you do this, you get much more replies.
So top three things that they can do, and then a personalized link to a personalized video for them about what they can achieve. So adding more value than expecting them to come and sign up, right? So if you just go and send out an email saying, okay, listen, why don't you come and sign up? Why don't you try a demo here? People are not going to do that.
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Chapter 7: What are the top features driving revenue for Reachbox.ai?
Should be roughly around those numbers. Yeah. I don't have that on top of my mind, but yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the team size today? Have you managed to stay pretty small or are you guys a bunch of people?
Yeah, we're pretty lean so far. We're about 26, 27 people now. But majority of our... Yes, yes. Full time.
Okay. Interesting. That's still pretty healthy, right? If I do 6 million divided by 27, what is that? 230,000 of revenue per employee. Is there room to improve that? Do you need 27 people or are you hiring ahead of growth?
I think we're hiring because we also have a couple of more initiatives getting launched in the coming months. So we have some more products coming out and that's where it is. We're investing in our future products.
Can you give us a hint? What's coming up?
More in the GTM space. We're building around future automation in the GTM space and trying to do things around the GTM space.
Okay. All right. So GTM space coming up. Affiliates are driving a lot of growth. Your own email outreach is driving a lot of growth. Any other growth? Do you do any SEO or no?
SEO does definitely drive quite a bit of traffic for us. But it's, of course, a very difficult channel for us, right? I mean, it's not the best channel, I would say. But, of course, user referrals and word of mouth is driving the most traffic for us.
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